Children increasingly access the Internet in their everyday activities and may access a variety of content from the Internet. A parent or an organization may deem some content inappropriate for a child and may wish to prevent that child from accessing such content.
If a parent deems Internet content inappropriate, the parent may use parental-control software to block a child from accessing the content. The parent may use the parental-control software to block access to a website with inappropriate content. However, blocking an entire website may be too coarse of a remedy in many cases. For example, an increasing amount of Internet content may be user-generated (e.g., blogs and social networking content). A website that hosts user-generated content may include both appropriate and inappropriate content.
Some parental-control software may help parents automatically block content on a case-by-case basis by scanning for keywords that signal inappropriate content. However, relying on keywords may produce too many false positives and too many false negatives. For example, a keyword that tends to signal inappropriate content may also have benign uses. Further, some inappropriate content may not include keywords that are helpful for identifying the content.
Websites that host user-generated content may pose a further difficulty for parents who wish to prevent their children from submitting inappropriate content. User-generated content is typically sent in a format (e.g., an image format, a movie format, etc.) that is difficult for computers to scan automatically. Furthermore, defining and maintaining parental-control policies for user-generated content may be prohibitively cumbersome. What is needed, therefore, is a more efficient and effective mechanism for applying parental controls to user-generated content of children.